maverick@mahogany.Berkeley.EDU (Vance Maverick) (06/19/91)
Linda Seltzer writes: > Vance, you raised an interesting issue. Too many musical analyses focus on > pitch issues as if music were a flat document on a page instead of an > interaction of people playing instruments. We should be paying more > attention to the sense of ensemble, the interaction among performers, etc. > Not that I'm against analysis of pitch content, but maybe the pendulum has > swung too far in that direction. The same for pop music. The notion of > "tracks" has influenced things to the point of virtually obliterating any > sense of dialog among performers. Such dialog is clearly present in > earlier styles such as old Boogie Woogie recordings. Responses to this veer off in several directions. In no particular order: * Pop use of the studio has on occasion been musically interesting, even preserved the dialogue of performers -- take /Abbey Road/ from "Sun King" onwards. * Lots of non-boogie-woogie has displayed dialogue; but in general the versions of any music that make it to the mainstream lose it. Case in point: the mutation of the big-band style from early un-arranged Basie to smooth composed Glenn Miller. * When has the "pendulum" of academic music discussion (my interpretation of your "we") ever swung any direction but pitchward? And the only one with any clear comp.music flavor, as I understand the charter -- * How, practically, can we achieve that feel of musical "actors" and "dialogue" and "ensemble" in (studio) computer music? David Jaffe's article, the title of which suggests he suggests a solution, rests on a somewhat strange idea of ensemble timing in human performance, and a probably inappropriate model of rhythm performance as distortion of an ideal....